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Rob Wittman and Jen Kiggans spent weeks telling Virginia voters that they would not vote to gut Medicaid, only to turn around and vote for the largest cuts to Medicaid in history.
Now the Richmond Times-Dispatch is calling them out for their brazen flip-flop, reporting that Wittman and Kiggans “crossed the line they drew for protecting Virginia’s Medicaid program.”
Read highlights from the reporting for yourself:
Richmond Times-Dispatch: Wittman, Kiggans back Trump bill, despite Medicaid cuts
By Michael Martz
July 5, 2025
- Rep. Rob Wittman, R-1st, and Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-2nd, may have crossed the line they drew for protecting Virginia’s Medicaid program, voting on Thursday to pass the budget package that would make deeper cuts to the health care safety net than the bill that the House of Representatives had approved in late May.
- Wittman and Kiggans, facing reelection challenges in swing districts next year, had signed letters to Republican leaders that said they could not support legislation that would reduce Medicaid health coverage for vulnerable populations.
- Both voted Thursday for a Senate version of the budget package they had sharply criticized nine days earlier as threatening access to Medicaid coverage and jeopardizing “the stability of our hospitals and providers.”
- Wittman’s and Kiggans’ support for the bill is drawing intense fire from Democrats, who have targeted both in midterm congressional elections next year. Democrats contend that the original House budget bill broke the pair’s promise to protect Medicaid, even before the Senate enacted deeper cuts to the safety net program that House Republicans endorsed on Thursday.
- “Jen Kiggans, Rob Wittman, and House Republicans have doubled down on their broken promise to working Virginians,” said Del. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
- “Let’s be clear — vulnerable Republicans have admitted time and time again that even they know their bill would obliterate access to health care, raise costs, cut jobs, threaten rural hospitals, and lead to families going hungry, but they voted to pass it anyway,” DelBene said.
- Virginia has six of the 330 rural hospitals nationwide that a University of North Carolina research center identified this month as financially vulnerable. One of them, Rappahannock General Hospital in Kilmarnock, operates in Wittman’s district. Another, Southampton Memorial Hospital in the city of Franklin, operates in Kiggans’ district.
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